Trial of Guatemala's Rios Montt delayed to 2015

The retrial of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity will not begin until January 2015, the Guatemalan court hearing the case informed the parties.

Originally set for April 2014, the process was postponed "for scheduling reasons," attorney Hector Reyes, representing the Center for Legal Action on Human Rights, told reporters.

The trial court "has many pending cases," a source in the Guatemalan judiciary told Efe.

The 87-year-old Rios Montt, who presided over an especially bloody phase of Guatemala's 1960-1996 civil war, was convicted in May and sentenced to 80 years in prison for the deaths of 1,771 Ixil Indians between March 1982 and August 1983.

But the Constitutional Court threw out the conviction and ordered a repeat of the trial.

Rios Montt remains under house arrest.

Representatives of the Ixils were in Washington on Wednesday to ask the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to condemn Guatemala for the "denial of justice" by virtue of the Constitutional Court's decision to overturn Rios Montt's conviction. This year's trial of Rios Montt marked the first time any Guatemalan ruler was called to account for the massacres and atrocities of a conflict that claimed more than 200,000 lives.

Most of the dead were Indian peasants slaughtered by the army and its paramilitary allies. EFE